


If I Ain’t Dead Already

by steeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeb



Series: Deep Brain [3]
Category: Hawkeye - Fandom, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: Cutting, Dystonia, Endgame, Natasha Is a Good Bro, Seizures, Suicidality, self-injury, very dark
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-09-04
Updated: 2020-10-15
Packaged: 2021-03-07 00:07:43
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,674
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26277655
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/steeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeb/pseuds/steeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeb
Summary: Clint lost his entire family in less time than it takes for him to fire his bow.  He’d do anything to get them back, to see them one more time.  Whatever it takes.Endgame set in the “Deep Brain” series.
Relationships: Clint Barton/Laura Barton
Series: Deep Brain [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/348986
Comments: 16
Kudos: 11





	1. Prologue

He’d watched the news all day.

Each report said the same thing, that billions of people seemingly disappeared in hazy clouds of dust and debris. Some reports managed to show cellphone footage of others disappearing in the middle of different activities: friends gathering in a group to take a group video, a video of a basketball game. A child blowing out the candles on a birthday cake. Parents in a hospital delivery floor filming their hours-old newborn baby to send to the grandparents.

The reports always followed a similar pattern: joyful people smiling and laughing, then the subject of the video is dusted, then panicked confusion. Terror. Sorrow. 

There was no pattern. No one could discern common characteristics as to who was dusted and who remained. Good people, bad people, rich, poor. Parents and children, even pets. Some said it was the Rapture, the End of Days, God’s punishment and wrath for any number of sins humanity committed. None of it mattered.

Not while Clint sat in his empty bathtub, at any rate, a loaded automatic handgun in his lap. The fact that he made it through an entire week after losing his whole family somewhat surprised him, though with each day the hope of his family returning dwindled exponentially. All at once they were gone: his wife, his children, even his older brother. Gone as if they never existed, if it weren’t for the photos on the wall and their toys scattered all over the house. Cooper and Nate’s baseball gloves still lay out in the yard near the picnic table next to Allie’s bucket of bubbles. 

Maybe if he understood the system, it’d be easier to handle. Maybe if only the family members of bad people were dusted, Clint would at least have something to blame. He would then know that it was his fault, that he had something to do with it directly, that his mind would be able to comprehend it. But there was no system, it was all seemingly random, and yet he was almost disproportionately affected. His entire family gone in ten seconds or so. 

The gun shot would be even quicker. He alternated between placements, set the barrel against his temple, his forehead, wrapped his lips around the steel mouth. He’d tasted gun metal before on missions, had the barrel of rifles shoved in his mouth as an intimidation tactic. None felt natural since firearms were not his weapon of choice, but it would do the trick if he had the stones to pull the trigger. 

Five years ago he sat on the outside of this same tub having a meltdown because he was unable to pick up his youngest son without dropping him. Clint bathed his older children in this same tub, back when it still had the ugly yellow tile that he replaced when Lilah was still a toddler. Nate was scared of the drain for the longest time, so transitioning him out of the sink downstairs was a soaked nightmare for an entire summer. Clint and Laura even managed to make love standing up in the tub, with Laura using the wall to remain upright and the water pounding down Clint’s back.

He rested his head against the cool tile and sobbed, the memories of his family echoing in his mind in the same way his hiccuping cries bounced around the tile. Everything was the same as the week before, the rim of the tub lined with his and her shampoo and body wash and various bath toys the younger kids used during bath time. The same faded yellow rubber duck Nate gave to Allie the day he asked about their difference in “parts” downstairs in the kitchen sink when she was a few weeks old. Laura’s conditioner that she never closed the cap for some reason. The body wash that gave Laura her scent. Lilah’s favorite bubble bath.

With his head resting against the tiles, any time he sobbed he could feel the small wire that was held on place by a plastic cap drilled into his skull. The wire was connected to a single magnet in his chest that activated the deep brain stimulation device in his cranium. He’d undergone a few revision surgeries to replace the device due to damage, and a second revision to implant a single battery activator, a change from the initial two that were surgically embedded into his chest. Without the device, Clint’s left hand curled into a tight fist, his limbs shook almost nonstop, and his fine motor skills were practically nonexistent. Four years ago, a former SHIELD agent who held a vendetta against Clint kidnapped him, then cut out each magnet and pulled the wires out of alignment by hand. The next two weeks were a living hell, much of which Clint did not remember due to the frequent seizures he experienced as a result of the faulty wires and massive infection that resulted. 

Sitting in the tub, trying to decide how he wanted to kill himself, Clint was momentarily grateful for the device. Without it, he would not have the fine motor control to handle the gun properly. At the same time, it also felt like a waste, like it was all for nothing. He would gladly give up the device to have his family back. Clint would do anything to hold his children once again, to hug and kiss his wife one more time.

He tried setting the gun against his forehead, arguing with his mind to just pull the trigger and be done with it. It wasn’t like firing his bow, which was a passive release; once he drew back, the bow did all the work. Firing a gun was active, deliberate. It was a conscious decision, and yet he was unable to make himself go through with it. 

For a few seconds Clint clacked his head against the tile, trying to distract himself from the emotional agony he was feeling. Yesterday he fired his bow until the string cut into his fingers, hoping that it would give him some form of clarity but found nothing. Only memories of the last time he saw his children.

He set the muzzle against his temple once again and tried to steady his breathing. To fire his bow he needed full control of his breath, so maybe that would help him now. His heart pounded until he could hear the beats in his ears, his finger exerting pressure on the trigger but not enough to actually fire. Just a click of the safety was all that was left.

Clint didn’t believe in Heaven, at least not for himself. He hoped in the end that he would somehow see his family once more, but he’d done too many terrible things to deserve it. He certainly believed in Hell—he was living in it. 

He pressed the button that released the safety, repositioning the gun against his temple. In a few seconds, less time than it took for his family to disappear, his life would be over as well.

Downstairs, his kitchen door opened and slammed shut, echoing in the empty space. Natasha dashed upstairs as soon as she heard the shot.


	2. Dead Skin on Trial

Needles never bothered Clint. He’d been poked and prodded by SHIELD docs for so many years that half the time they stuck him while he was asleep and he rarely noticed. As a kid he unknowingly delivered heroine between tents while traveling with the circus, told that the needles were for “diabetes” that many of the roustabouts suddenly acquired. Laura has given him plenty of steroid shots and antibiotics to help him heal from various maladies and infections.

Had given. Past tense. 

He’d bounced around the world over the past two years, infiltrating underground organizations and eliminating as many as he could find, if only to get himself out of his head for a little while. It was how he landed in Japan, sitting in a tattoo parlor as a large man bore into his skin. The artist himself was heavily covered with tattoos, some more traditional than others, with only the skin of his face bare enough to see his original skin color. Clint briefly worried the artist, Daiki, understood what he wanted until he sketched a quick doodle of what Clint managed to cobble together in his broken Japanese. “ _Shinigami ronin...ryu,_ uh, here,” he said, gesturing down his arm. Daiki asked him a question, and Clint understood bits and pieces, but he had not spent time long enough in Japan to understand the language fluently yet.

It was Natasha’s idea to travel the world, to leave the farm so he would not be constantly reminded of what he lost. Right now he should be visiting colleges with his oldest son, and sending his youngest off to kindergarten. Lilah would be in the middle of high school, and Nate in elementary. Almost any thought he had drifted back to his wife or his children, and each day was just another reminder of their absence. What Natasha did not understand was that he could travel the length of the universe and back and still find reminders of them. 

When she found him in the bathroom two years ago, pieces of tile and dusty drywall coating his hair where the bullet tore through the wall, she recognized that Clint was torturing himself by staying at home. 

Natasha knew what he was doing when he fired the gun. She didn’t believe in God but she thanked whatever deity listening that she arrived at the farm when she did; Clint had said that hearing the kitchen door open made him jerk his hand away from his head at the last second, sending the shot into the tile instead of Clint’s brain. If she were literally _seconds_ later, she would be staring at the corpse of her best friend, watching a deluge of blood and brain matter coat his tub.

She had told him to try something different after he called and said that globe-hopping was not much of a distraction. Every country he visited had a memory attached: in Italy, Clint remembered that Cooper said “dada” for the first time over the phone. In Mongolia, Clint watched as Lilah showed off her first missing tooth when he video-called them at three in the morning in his time. While in Africa, Clint encountered Wanda for the first time, who shared a deep connection with his youngest children. Everywhere Clint went, the memories were sure to follow.

A tattoo was about as “different” as Clint could imagine. Once when he and Barney were small, in the orphanage days, Barney tried to tattoo Clint’s hand using a regular sewing needle and an ink pen. Apart from some tiny red spots that looked like dirty bee stings, Barney’s brief foray into tattoo artistry did not take and the ink washed away within a week. The design he created with Daiki would be a permanent fixture.

When Daiki showed him a sketch of what he understood, Clint was impressed: an image of a skull in traditional ronin or samurai armor stared back at him, it’s soulless eyes communicating an empty hollow feeling. The image morphed into a green dragon that, if Clint understood Daiki’s gestures and limited English, would wrap around Clint’s forearm. The fact that he was able to understand Clint’s choppy Japanese and gestures was even more impressive.

As Daiki prepared his tattoo gun and confirmed the colors Clint wanted, he opened his phone and tapped a translation app that would translate a Japanese sentence into English and speak the sentence.

“ _Yen or credit card?_ ”

“Uh, yen,” Clint stuttered, fishing for his wallet. Daiki gestured for him to wait. Clint rarely used his cards, too easy to track him that way.

Daiki sanitized Clint’s arm and prepared the stencil against his skin, pointing to a mirror for Clint to get an idea of the alignment and placement of the tattoo. After a back and forth thumbs-up exchange, Clint resumed sitting and mentally prepared himself for the lengthy process. In total his tattoo would take about six hours to complete, the same length of time as his deep brain stimulation surgeries. 

Daiki rarely spoke for the first half hour, focusing on outlining the image of the skull and samurai armor. He almost seemed concerned that Clint made no indication as to whether or not the tiny needles etching into his skin caused him any pain.

“You okay?” Daiki paused before starting the next line. Clint nodded, flexing his arm briefly. There was a slight sting, almost like a sunburn, but not the worst he’d ever felt. Daiki resumed his work, allowing Clint to zone out for a bit. Even without the dystonia, Clint’s artistic ability was practically nonexistent. He could write his name and maybe doodle a few basic images to keep his youngest children interested, but he did not have the patience to learn something so intricate. Clint saw better from a distance, and being up close and into microscopic details just was not his forte. 

Daiki began shading in the hollow eye sockets of the skull. “You people lose?”

Clint raised his head, unsure that he even heard the sentence correctly over the sound of the tattoo gun. “Hmm?”

“You people lose. Family... _eeto_...”. Daiki clicked over to his app once again and spoke a quick word into it, flipping the phone around to show Clint. _Dust._

He was asking if Clint’s family turned to dust.

Clint briefly froze, then nodded slowly. As soon as he nodded, Daiki turned his chair around and pointed at a picture on the wall. “My family 粉塵. Same.” The image showed a beautiful young woman holding a small girl on her lap, Daiki’s arms wrapped around both of them. Like Clint, the happiness in the photo was non-existent in the face of the man sitting before him. 

Almost without thinking, Clint reached into his back pocket and fished for his phone. He spent so long trying to keep his family secret to the point that they were not even mentioned in SHIELD’s files, but now that they were gone he almost wanted to prove they existed at one point. In his photos app, he found the last picture he took of all the kids together. “My family. All dust,” he whispered, trying to blink away the tears at the rims of his eyelids. Daiki looked at the photo and smiled, first pointing to Allie, then lowering his hand to the ground. Next he pointed to Cooper, then raised his hand above his head.

Clint smiled sadly, nodding. “Yeah, they were twelve years apart. Nate and Allie weren’t exactly planned, so there’s a bit of a gap between the older kids and the younger kids.”

As Clint spoke, Daiki resumed shading in the skull and surrounding helmet. He stopped once to determine how he would handle a bundle of scars on the back of Client’s bicep, pointing to them and thinking out loud. Clint took the opportunity to examine the completed work, then the scars on his bicep. “Bar fight. Got cut with a bottle.”

Apparently when trying to shoot himself didn’t work, Clint’s next option was to drink himself into oblivion and get into as many fights as his body would allow. Alcohol did little more than make him care less about his own survival than he already did. It was better than actively cutting and burning himself, if anything; the scars and marks on his right arm told that story.

For the past 18 months or so, Nat checked in with him regularly by showing up at the farm and staying for a few days. She never told him when she was coming, and usually called when she was about fifteen minutes out. The fact that he wore long-sleeve shirts covered the cuts and burns, so if she noticed the amount of bloody bandages in his trash can she never said anything until she had definitive proof. During her last visit, when Clint was in a bar and was unable to hear that she called, she tracked his phone and walked in just as Clint was getting his face pummeled in by a biker. 

Natasha hauled the biker upwards as if he weighed little more than a toddler, mindful of the overwhelming scent of whiskey and cheap beer that radiated from Clint on the floor. Hopefully Clint was too drunk to really feel the beating that royally mashed up his face. 

She half-dragged him back to the farm, a towel wrapped around his shoulder to staunch the bleeding after someone sliced him with a busted beer bottle. “What happened, Clint?”

“Got into a fight,” he mumbled into his hand, his head already pounding. 

“Yeah, no shit. What started it?”

Clint shrugged. “Fuck if I know, I don’t even remember. He said something, I said something, shit got heated.”

“You’re lucky you weren’t stabbed,” Natasha continued, not bothering to hide the aggravation in her voice. “Your new friend was going for the knife in his back pocket.”

“Yeah? Too bad you stopped him.”

She let the comment hang until they arrived back at the farm, cloaked in darkness, the headlights reflecting off the first story windows. The motion-sensing porch lights would pick up any movement as soon as they got out of the car.

“Being dead won’t bring them back, Clint.”

“No,” he whispered. “No, it won’t.” He peeled back the towel to look at the blood still wetting the fabric, wincing as he placed the towel back on his skin.

“Come on, that’ll need stitches.”

Between the alcohol and blood loss, Clint had to steady himself against the railing as soon as the porch light clicked on. Sometimes he paused when the light came on, wondering if this would be the time that Laura opened the door or one of his kids came running outside to greet him. But every time the door remained shut. 

Nat unlocked the door and lugged him inside, depositing Clint in the kitchen at the head of the table. He left the kitchen largely the same, and hardly did more than cook in a single pot and drink himself plastered most nights. “Take your shirt off, I’ll get the kit.”

The first few times they patched each other up in the field, there was obvious sexual tension until Clint finally told her about Laura. Gradually over time the tension morphed into thankful, focused concerned. Each time they secretly wished it would be the last they would have to go through the routine, knowing full well that it wouldn’t be. As Clint sat at the kitchen table, slumped over with a bloody towel on his shoulder, they both found the familiarity comforting.

Natasha sat behind him, cleaning the area with antiseptic. They were usually quiet when stitching the other up; while out in the field, the stitcher needed the quiet to concentrate and the one receiving the stitches listened for any trouble that may have followed them back to whatever safe house they were hold up in at the time. For the briefest of seconds, Clint could pretend that he was still on a mission and merely away from his family.

If the antiseptic or the needle going into his skin bothered Clint, he made no indication that it did so. “You’re lucky the bottle didn’t cut through your implant wire.”

“Am I? What difference does it make, Nat?”

She knew he was being belligerent but refused to bite. “Well, for one thing, I’d have to help you put on pants again. And as much fun as that sounds, my hands have been near your junk too many times,” she mused, tying off the last stitch. “Sit still, I’ll clean up.”

It was after she discarded the used supplies that she noticed the thin lines across Clint’s right bicep, too clean and neat to be caused by an accident. There were only a few, maybe five lines from what she could see. Natasha reached out and touched the remnants of the lines.

“What are these from, Clint?”

Clint paused from rubbing his temples and looked to his bicep. “Hmm? Nothin.’”

“Bullshit. When did you do this?”

“Couple weeks ago.”

Nat peered closer, then shoved Clint away as if she could disconnect his arm and throw it across the room. She wrapped her own arms around herself and walked in a circle, her lip quivering. “Clint, I don’t know how to help you. Please, just tell me what to do.”

He shrugged, suddenly feeling small. “There’s nothing you can do, Nat.”

“Every time you don’t answer your phone, I worry that something is wrong. Every time I come here I wonder if I’m going to find you dead or strung up somewhere.”

“Always an option, I guess.”

“Shut up!” Natasha whirled around at him, anger coloring her face. “You don’t get to joke about this, not when I nearly lost you. If I had been mere _seconds_ later I would’ve found you with a bullet in your brain upstairs. Why are you doing this?” She pointed to his arm once again with an accusatory finger.

Barton picked at a hangnail on his thumb, his eyes clouding over. “I need to feel something other than sadness, Nat. Pain helps me think of something else for a few minutes.”

“Is that why you’ve been getting into fights?”

He nodded, closing his eyes tightly against the rush of extreme sadness and guilt he felt. Even the pain in his shoulder was unable to bring him out of the deluge of hurt. “I’m sorry, Tasha, I’m sorry.”

Nat tugged his head against her hip as he began to cry, repeating that he was sorry as if it were a mantra. She loved this extremely broken man, but she was unable to help him through the unfathomable anguish he felt. All Natasha could do was let him break apart over and over again, and hope that the next break would still be reparable.


End file.
